


giving back

by gaytimetraveller



Category: Persona | Revelations Persona
Genre: it’s her birthday! and i don’t have time to draw her so here we are
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-05
Updated: 2018-06-05
Packaged: 2019-05-18 11:28:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14851890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gaytimetraveller/pseuds/gaytimetraveller
Summary: Maki had taken up gardening as a hobby.





	giving back

**Author's Note:**

> hhhhhh thanks to my overdue graphics project i don’t have time to draw her today but here’s. a short thing. for makis birthday because i love her dearly
> 
> also i’ve recently taken up having far more indoor plants than before and it’s been good

After moving out of Mikage-cho, Maki had taken up gardening. Not the actual having a garden kind, as considering she lived in an apartment there wasn’t much chance for an actual garden. Secretly, she thought that it might be overwhelming to have a whole garden at once, not to mention the costs.

 

Instead, she started with indoor plants, things that were easy to grow in pots. Maki didn’t have much luck with succulents; she thought perhaps her apartment was too cold, a little too drafty. They withered away in the winter chill. She mourned to throw them out.

 

But, she did have more luck with hanging plants. And herbs, and occasionally small colourful flowers she knew weren’t really supposed to grow inside but she couldn’t keep herself from wanting to try.

 

At first, it was difficult, to try to keep them going, to learn how to take care of them. She desperately moved a hanging plant around her small home to try to keep it clinging to life, and she left the little plant store tags in her flowers, just as a reminder of their names and how much they needed watering.

 

But, eventually, it was calming; to quietly keep at her plants. It was a hobby for herself, it was nice to foster something living, to see things grow and bloom into new life. It almost felt like giving back, for all the trouble she’d caused she was giving back something, even if only something small, they still grew and flourished and that was enough.

 

It was fun to buy cute watering pails, and soothing to repot overgrown or new plants into new pots, even if she wasn’t especially a fan of the way dirt stuck under her fingernails. It gave her a reason to putter around her apartment instead of staying in bed on her days off, she couldn’t neglect something she was trying so hard to help thrive.

 

She delighted in the way flowers started to bloom beneath her fingers as the weather changed for the warmer, and how plants that had started to wither under flickering store lights and too-small pots came back to life under her watch. She delighted in the way that clippings started to root and grow into their own once she knew how to take care of them. It was new life from discarded pieces, and it was  _ delightful _ .

 

When Eriko came to visit, she said Maki’s apartment had turned into a greenhouse in her absence. That made her proud, it made her glow, that she had been able to grow so much within the confines of a drafty box. To be able to create instead of destroy, to be able to shape and guide her own dreams as easily as her steadily climbing ivy.

 

Finally, she had found something that could bloom instead of wither under her touch, something that, for everything she had taken, she could give back.


End file.
